Review: For fluffy summer fare, Men in Black 3 is surprisingly poignant

Film Review: Men in Black 3 (3 stars)

3 stars

In Men in Black, Agent J, a government operative who investigates aliens on Earth, asked his partner, Agent K: “Did you ever flashy-thing me?” While it sounds like something perverts might do with a trench coat, J was talking about whether K ever subjected him to the neuralyzer, a device that erases a person’s memory.

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Fifteen years later, audiences still remember the shiny neuralyzer, the slimy aliens, the zippy one-liners and the young wise-cracking cowboy paired with the strict, stony veteran; some will still be able to even hum the accompanying rap song by Will Smith back when he was getting jiggy with it. And lucky for them, director Barry Sonnenfeld remembers what made the original film, which was based on a comic book, so fun.

Reprising the lead role of J in Men in Black 3 is Smith, who has found the most coveted secret in the universe: agelessness. Tommy Lee Jones, however, is not as fortunate. As K, he’s “old, craggy, and surly.”

“I keep emotion out of it,” K says early in the film.

“Out of what — life?” J replies.

Jones keeps “it” out of his performance as well, except when he’s trying to portray sadness, in which case, he looks like an old Basset hound. The actor’s performance is so tepid it creates a dissonance between the famed duo. But this is soon rectified.

The film finds the partners 14 years after J was first recruited to the secret government agency. The pair wander around in the first act as if by rote, wiping out the memories of humans who’ve encountered E.T.s. K does his frowning and J does his quipping: “That does not belong in a pita, it belongs in a casket,” or, “You look like you come from the Planet Damn.” There’s a laser-gun fight in a Chinese restaurant, and J gets covered in alien goo. Standard MIB fare.

Things get interesting, though, when Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords) breaks out of his moon jail with the help of a Pussycat Doll (Nicole Scherzinger) and travels back in time to kill K. Boris is a worthy adversary — his teeth have teeth, his palms shoot porcupine quills and his eyes are black camera lenses; they look like empty Skee ball holes and I kept hoping one of the agents would bowl some eyeballs into them.

To save K — and the world — J jumps, quite literally, from the Chrysler Building, and travels back in time more than 40 years to 1969. This is where Sonnenfeld and his team are at their best.

In the ’60s, J is a fish out of water once again. The audience can be surprised and confounded by a new world where neuralyzers are the size of MRI machines and cellphones are the shape of silver sneakers. Zingers are even zippy again: “The Viagrans discovered a revolutionary new pill,” says one agent in the past.

And the old Jones is replaced by a younger version with the charisma of the first movie as Josh Brolin plays K at 29. Screenwriter Etan Cohen (Tropic Thunder, Madagascar 2) was keen enough to include a line referring to K having “city miles” on him — that’s because Brolin is 44. Not that it matters — Brolin nails the unimpressed glare, the twang and the cool.

The past is also filled with more of special effects artist Rick Baker’s alien creations and new gadgets, including a single-wheeled vehicle that looks like the agents are travelling inside frisbees. You’d think everything would appear out-of-this-world in 3D; but the effect adds little.

After J convinces the young K that he is from the future, they visit Andy Warhol’s famed Factory — “I was an agent for three years before I found out that all models were aliens,” J says — where they find the artist himself (Bill Hader). It’s a fluffy summer diversion with a surprisingly poignant finale.

Men in Black 2 was critically panned for being all alien and no soul. This time around, there’s no need for the flashy thing.